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Museums and Design for Creative Lives questions what we sacrifice when we allow economic imperatives to shape public museums, whilst also considering the implications of these new museum realities. It also asks: how might we instead design for creative lives?
Drawing together 28 case studies of museum design spanning 70 years, the book explores the spatial and social forms that comprise these successful examples, as well as the design methodologies through which they were produced. Re-activating a well-trodden history of progressive museum design and raising awareness of the involvement of built forms in how we feel, think and act, MacLeod provides strategies and methods to actively counter the economisation of museums and a call to museum makers to work beyond the economic and advance this deeply human history of museum making.
Museums and Design for Creative Lives will be of great interest to academics and students in museum studies, gallery studies, heritage studies, arts management, communication and architecture and design departments, as well as those interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. The book provides a valuable resource for museum leaders and practitioners.
Suzanne MacLeod is Professor of Museum Studies at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, where she also undertakes collaborative and practice-centred research with a range of cultural institutions in the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries. She is author of Museum Architecture: A New Biography and co-editor of The Future of Museum and Gallery Design, Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions and Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions
Museums and
Design for
Creative Lives
Suzanne MacLeod
First published 2021 by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Macleod, Suzanne, author.
Title: Museums and design for creative lives / Suzanne MacLeod.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
CHaPTeR 26 Pride & Prejudice, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK, 2014–19 246
CHaPTeR 27 SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil, 1982– 254
CHaPTeR 28 Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, New York, USA, 2015 266
CHaPTeR 29 Talking About … Disability & Art, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK, 2006–8 274
CHaPTeR 30 The Past Is Now: Birmingham and the British Empire, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK, 2017 282
CHaPTeR 31 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, USA, 1993– 290
Acknowledgements 300
List of illustrations 301
Index 306
Preface
What can museums and design offer to our sense of humanity, democracy and everyday life at a moment in history when the advancement of neoliberalism means that all aspects of life (including non-economic spheres of law, education, healthcare and arts and culture) are expected to act like businesses and, as human beings, we are no longer conceived of as citizens and are, instead, more and more reduced to human capital. Willing museums to take confident hold of the social impact of built forms, interpretive media and design processes, and to harness museum space as a counter to the unequal space of advanced capital, Museums and Design for Creative Lives asks: What do we sacrifice when we allow economic imperatives to shape the physical public museum? What are the larger implications of the new museum realities that economic imperatives produce? And how might we, instead, design for creative lives?
Drawing together 28 case studies of progressive museum design spanning 70 years, Museums and Design for Creative Lives harnesses Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space to explore the spatial and social forms that comprise these successful examples as well as the design methodologies through which they were produced. Reactivating a well-trodden history of progressive museum design and raising awareness of the involvement of built forms in our lives – in how we feel, think and act – Museums and Design for Creative Lives provides strategies and methods to actively counter the economisation of museums and a call to museum makers who might be equally inspired by this history to experiment with new spatial and social forms in cultural institutions dedicated to enabling the living of life.
The research has emerged over a number of years and through a range of encounters and opportunities. During a year of research leave supported by the University of Leicester, I was able to read broadly across a range of subjects including museum studies, political economy, cultural and urban geography, psycho-geography and philosophy. The time to read and think enabled me to draw together a range of thoughts and concerns that have recurred throughout my research for many years, to engage with new scholarship and to revisit the work of Henri Lefebvre, so fundamental to my research and practice, through a new generation of Lefebvre scholars. During this time, I was also able to travel and visit a good number of the projects I write about in the book.1 The research has involved a deep engagement with over 80 case studies of museum
design. This number was reduced to 28 for the book. Sometimes these projects are firsts – amazing trailblazing projects that became famous and were, in some cases, corrupted through repetition – and sometimes they are relatively recent experiments in museum making.
A characteristic of the research has been an attempt to work from the forms and relationships produced across the projects and maintain my focus on their materiality and making. The approach is intentional and is driven by a firm belief that the expertise needed to enable museums to reach their potential as a force for good in society is within our grasp, but is challenged continually by the embedded history of museums, their colonial and paternalistic origins, the conventions and ‘rules’ of professional practice and the current dominant mode of production which is driving all societal systems towards processes of economisation. Museums and Design for Creative Lives stubbornly returns to an inspiring, rule-breaking lineage of progressive museum design and explores this physical history as a route to understanding more about the strategies through which particular spatial and social relationships were encouraged and prioritised and the methods through which these cultural organisations sought to create landscapes full of potential.
The project is also driven by a belief that museum design needs to be practised within an understanding of the historical development and actions of museum space and an awareness of the requirements of design in a context of advanced capital. So much museum design, if not the bulk of it, is undertaken without these historical and theoretical co-ordinates, one result of which is a lack of questioning of processes and conventions. Museums and Design for Creative Lives is an attempt to draw these co-ordinates to the surface and, by looking at an amazing history of progressive museum design, to challenge museum makers to work together to assume what Gage (2019) calls a ‘baseline of equality’ in the re-workings of museum space that they have the privilege, quite literally, to shape. Lefebvre offers a route towards this in his open-ended understanding of the production of space and his challenge to us all to prioritise lived experience and the making of space through the action and creativity that stems from diversity.
Early on in the research, I realised that the decision about which case studies to include was not going to come from the museum studies
literature. The literature is so vast and diverse that it often proved impossible to glean any real sense of the projects that had made significant contributions to a form of museum making absolutely focused on people and society. Rather, I began to talk to socially engaged professionals working in the cultural sector around the world to find out which projects had inspired their own work. Museum professionals, particularly those who are unshifting in their belief in the (often thwarted) potential of arts and culture as a positive social force, carry influential projects around with them in their heads. What surprised me is that these are amazingly few in number.
Gradually, projects were suggested, researched in archives and through secondary sources, and included. More commonly, excellent projects dropped away as the archival and desk-based research progressed and it became clear that, whilst excellent, they could tell us less about particular developments in design. In a good number of cases, language limitations on my ability to access archives meant that excellent examples were impossible to work up. Those that remain, as imperfect as they are, offer some sense of a coherent group. Together, they speak of an incredible history of museum design which is emancipatory in its intent and exceptional for its active work to engage human beings, address social inequality and open up opportunities for creative lives, that is, for modes of human experience far broader and far more active than those that dominate in a society increasingly given over to exchange.
The final year of working on the book, once back from study leave and fully immersed in the routine of the School of Museum Studies, has had a significant impact on the content. With my colleague Professor Richard Sandell, I had the opportunity to develop Museums and Design for Creative Lives as a new core module across all of the Museum Studies programmes taught in the School. The experience of working through this process with Richard, whose own research and insights I value so much, and of sharing and exploring the projects and ideas with so many brilliant students, has had a significant impact on the research. Throughout this second phase, I was also fortunate to be able to test out and think through many of the ideas encapsulated in the book in two RCMG (Research Centre for Museums and Galleries) research-led projects developed with the National Trust: a project on loneliness and social isolation at Calke Abbey in South Derbyshire, which I include in the book, and an experimental test programme called All In through which we are working with a range of properties and heritage landscapes to test new approaches to inclusive practice.
At Calke, working in full collaboration with the Calke team, we set out to do two things: first, to impact the whole team culture (staff and volunteers) by generating new ways of working towards the team’s aim of working more ambitiously and in more connected ways around interpretation; and, second, to deliver new interpretation at the site to challenge the stigma that surrounds loneliness and social
isolation, get people talking about loneliness and how it is that so many people can become disconnected from necessary social networks, and prompt small acts of kindness within and beyond the visit in full recognition of the fact that the solution to loneliness and isolation is human contact and connection.
We set out to re-orient Calke away from an ostensibly commercial endeavour selling an interesting day out – what we described as ‘the conventional heritage visit’ – based in part on a stigmatising story of the ‘eccentric’ and ‘anti-social’ family who once lived there, towards a visit which could open up new, fine-grained and respectful stories of loneliness, isolation, kindness and compassion. The opportunity to work through the challenges of both re-orienting the visitor experience at Calke towards a more socially focused sense of being and opening up a greater register of experiential possibilities with so many brilliant colleagues at Calke proved invaluable. As I enter the last months of working on the book, All In is proving equally inspiring and is providing a much-needed opportunity to share Museums and Design for Creative Lives with others and test out aspects of its content.
The book that has resulted from all these experiences is intended as a challenge to the uncritical acceptance of the economisation of museums and heritage as well as the deeply ingrained spatial and social conventions of museum space and design that do so much to limit the social potential of arts and culture. It is also a reminder of three things. First, the necessary role of formal cultural institutions in advanced capitalist economies as spaces that open up possibilities for full and creative lives beyond the economic. Second, the centrality of such experiences in the formation of relations to self, to others and to the wider social world necessary to happiness, equality and the nurturing of democracy. Finally, it is a reminder of the amazing history of progressive museum making and the processes, as well as the spatial and social strategies, that socially engaged cultural professionals have developed towards these ends. In many ways, this history comes together in contemporary examples of museum making such as Museo Ferrowhite in Argentina and Blue House in Hong Kong. Vastly different and yet fundamentally similar in their determination to support the living of life, Museo Ferrowhite and Blue House stand as exemplars of the moments of emancipatory museum making we need to identify, understand and enable.
NOTe
1 A small number of entries in Museums and Design for Creative Lives were developed through a project called The Future of Museum and Gallery Design which comprised a conference in Hong Kong and an edited volume. The Derby Silk Mill entry is based on the Butler, Fox and MacLeod (2018) chapter in that volume and the entry on the Museum at the Gateway Arch draws its content from Bill Haley and Oriel Wilson’s (2018) chapter in the same volume. The broader set of ideas informing Museums and Design for Creative Lives was explored through an essay written for Art Centre Basel (MacLeod 2017). The entry on Guggenheim Helsinki also draws on this publication.
Introduction
In his book Contemporary Library Architecture, the architectural writer Ken Worpole begins by celebrating the recent renaissance in library design and the transformation of libraries into dynamic public spaces where the traditional library functions of collecting and ordering books and activities such as reading have been expanded to include meeting, discussing and socialising. Worpole describes these new civic spaces as providing the ‘intellectual heart of civic life’, as ‘central to the improved life chances and wellbeing of people in modern democratic societies’ and as ‘the everyday humanity of sharing a common intellectual space with other people’ (Worpole 2013: 4, 11). Based on Trevor Boddy’s observation that the new libraries provide niches for scholars, corporate researchers, bibliomanes, teen-daters and homeless people sheltering from the rain, Worpole argues that the strengths of the new public libraries lie in the diversity of public spaces they offer, the universal welcome and reach embodied in their spatial forms and the learning, participation and opportunities to build social capital that they enable. The public library is, for Worpole, ‘ “the last good place” in an overwhelmingly commercialised urban environment’ (ibid.: 19).
Museums fare less well in Worpole’s analysis. Commenting on the now debunked idea of the ‘Bilbao-effect’ where iconic museum architecture is claimed to act as a driver for economic development, and pointing to the often disconnected approach to much new museum making, Worpole argues that libraries have the ‘civic edge’ over museums and galleries (ibid.: 5). As he states, ‘in several of the most audacious designs for new world-status museums there is actually nowhere for people to sit or engage with one another’.
‘Who’, he asks, ‘are these buildings really designed for, and what is the nature of civic entitlement and democratic exchange embodied within them?’ (ibid.: 4–5).
It is certainly not straightforward to feel optimistic about museums or to make the claims for museums that Worpole makes for libraries. Internationally, the museum landscape is complex, fractured and riddled with contradictions. In museums themselves, physical traces of the commercial are evident everywhere from blatant corporate branding, to the appearance and solidity of paywalls and the glint of the spectacular. One senses, increasingly, that in many museums today – and I include here galleries and heritage sites – we are positioned more as a consumer than a citizen and that many museums are slowly turning their backs on the public domain and
their role in generating any sense of civic entitlement. In these museums, it increasingly feels as though it is our ‘spend per head’ that really matters, rather than our learning, creativity, expression and participation. These responses are real, a direct reaction to the physical spaces of museums and galleries, the way they make us feel and the cultural policies and imperatives that give shape to them. Museums are being pushed towards a whole series of economising1 processes – ‘the processes through which behaviours, organizations, institutions and, more generally, objects are constituted as being “economic” ’ (Çalıs˛kan and Callon 2010: 2) – which are gradually changing what they do, slowly but surely reshaping their physical forms and, as we visit and inhabit those forms, slowly, imperceptibly, reshaping us.
Yet, there are museums we visit where the feeling is something else, much more akin to the buzz of interactions and the inclusive and democratic use that Worpole so enjoys in the new libraries. A day spent at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) with friends or family is still, despite the creep of the commercial increasingly evident at the site, a day of fresh air and conversation stimulated by access to exceptional art in a once highly privileged landscape now given over to shared and democratic use (Figure 0.1). YSP is free and it attracts, as a result, a loyal group of local visitors who use the site to relax, spend time with each other and with art and walk the dog. It is an experience full of surprise and delight, which speaks as much to our bodies and senses as it does to our intellect and one only needs to look at visitor comments and at the ways in which people want to leave tributes to loved ones at the site, to understand its significance to so many people, myself included. As well as generating conversations and opening up questions and opportunities of human interest and importance through its curation, the physicality of YSP opens up a side of our human being increasingly silenced in other public spaces. These experiences are so much a part of us that places like YSP become embroiled in our relationships.
There are myriad other examples on which we can draw. A visit to the National Museum of Literature in Tainan in southern Taiwan reveals a museum full of children and families reading together and a space in the centre of the museum where young people hang out after school and do homework (Figure 0.2). Similarly, the buzz of excitement and the chatter of human beings characterises any visit to the World Museum in Liverpool; visit at half term and the excitement levels are
off the scale as families choose to spend time together and with others to explore the treasures the museum holds and the opportunities it creates on their behalf. For some reason in this museum we seem to have more chance encounters – those moments of joyful and unexpected exchange with strangers which are so rare in contemporary life. Significantly, it is only in Liverpool’s museums where I have witnessed Boddy’s and Worpole’s genuine diversity of people and genuine institutional comfort with varying forms of use rooted in the lives of local people.
At the Casa de la Memoria in Medellín, Colombia, we are thrown together with visitors of all nationalities as we experience and feel the horror of lives lost through carefully constructed displays that draw in so many diverging voices and experiences towards the shared aim of reconciliation (Figure 0.3). Similarly, in Taipei in Northern Taiwan, at the National Human Rights Museum, the raw presentation of the prison and the experience of moving around the historic site in conversation with a survivor of the White Terror is an experience as moving as anything to be experienced in the world of museums (Figure 0.4). In each of these museums we sense that the site, its contents and the modes of engagement they enable and encourage have been shaped by a deep understanding of museums as common
public places which operate in the realm of meanings and values and, first and foremost, by a desire to invest in people and open up multiple human subjectivities, opportunities and relationships. In each of these museums, the physical site and interpretive media are shaped in such a way to enable these and myriad other forms of experience, expression, participation and interaction. Here, far from being a consumer, we are a concerned citizen, a child, a parent, an expert, a learner, a complex individual, a feeling and sensing human being.
What is clear, however, is that this kind of museum making is increasingly compromised by the dynamics working to economise cultural institutions. One only needs to visit the Science Museum in London to find traces of a very different spatial and social landscape and to see how the economisation of culture slowly begins to inform design decisions and change the visitor experience. The museum’s life-draining entrance sequence is a case in point. Designed with the sole intent of encouraging visitors to donate in a space that should be about transitioning from the street into a world of knowledge, enquiry and experimentation, the experience is stressful and confusing for both visitors and staff.2 Even more demoralising is the decision to place Wonderlab, the new incarnation of the Science
Figure 0.1 Yorkshire Sculpture Park. View across the lake back towards the mansion. Image: Simon Knell.
Figure 0.2 The Central Atrium, National Museum of Taiwan Literature. Image: Young-shun Lin/NMTL.
Figure 0.3 Main exhibition, Medellín: Memories of Violence and Resistance, Museo Casa de la Memoria Medellín. Image: Museo Casa de la Memoria Medellín.
Museum’s much-loved children’s interactive gallery, behind a paywall, to brand it as the Statoil3 Gallery, and to introduce yet more instances of buying and queuing in the experience. Wonderlab overwrites a remarkable history of investment in the design of children’s science galleries at the Museum dating back to the 1930s and of generation after generation of children and their carers exploring and experimenting together. In its place, a glitzy, corporate experience is now only available to those who are able to pay and who are willing and able to spend significant amounts of time queuing to purchase and access the experience.
The Science Museum isn’t alone. Signs of economisation and commercialisation are everywhere in the physical museum from the now normalised harnessing of museums to regeneration processes which inevitably result in the application of an iconic design and a series of functional and symbolic demands far removed from discussions of social value (MacLeod 2017), to the more opportunistic and cynical utilisation of museums in land deals which often results in uncomfortable physical solutions (Ning 2014; Harris 2008; Moore 2016). At the Design Museum in London, a complex
series of property and finance deals resulted in a major museum being nestled awkwardly amongst what must be some of the most expensive apartments in the capital (Moore 2016).
Whilst some museums seem to be locked into a strategy of perpetual growth (building outstations, adding extensions, digging out basements and adding as much space as possible to fit in more income generating activity), others are closing their doors as they are deemed unsustainable as a direct result of cuts to public funding and their inability to generate income. Many others are left struggling. Challenged to become more efficient, to stand on their own two feet and become financially sustainable, the emphasis and burden shifts to corporate sponsorship and space hire – both of which introduce competing meanings and values into museums –various other forms of income generation and, importantly, the visitor who can pay. In this new museum reality, visitors are repositioned as economic beings, and culture becomes, as Wendy Brown (2015: 188) has argued of the humanities more broadly, ‘something for individuals to imbibe like chocolate, practice like yoga, or utilise like engineering’.
Figure 0.4 A tour guided by Fred Chin in front of the Human Rights Memorial, Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, Taiwan. Image: Bill Haley.
Of course public museums have always been bound up in capitalism. As Mark O’Neill (2013: 159) has written, museums were a ‘characteristic invention of the earliest capitalist societies’. In these societies (and this is different from the ways in which museums developed in other parts of the world) museums can be understood as ‘countervailing institutions’ designed ‘to mitigate the negative consequences of changes driven by the market and to promote nonmarket values, in order to ensure the survival of the overall market system’ (based on Muller in ibid.: 159). Modern public museums, many of which were developed by political progressives, radicals and reformers, were designed to open up cultural resources to the working and the poor and to provide some kind of antidote to the dehumanising processes and outcomes of capital. Embedded in the very DNA of our public museums then, is a desire for what Marx called ‘the true realm of freedom’, Kurtz called ‘the fullness of life’ and Aristotle termed ‘the good life’, that is, life beyond mere survival and the creation of wealth (Brown 2015: 43; Kurtz 1994).
Today, a vast array of research makes it clear that museums and galleries continue to offer opportunities and possibilities for knowledge and understanding which are, just as Collini (in Belfiore 2013) has described of the humanities, ‘of a piece with the kinds of understanding and judgement involved in living a life’. This function of museums – as radical spaces which humanise capital and invest in humanity, in living a full life and which, as Worpole notes of libraries, are as central to our life chances and well-being as they are to democracy – has never been more necessary or more threatened than it is at the current time. As advanced capitalism eats up everything in its path, even the non-market spheres of activity so central to democracy and human happiness – healthcare, law, education, and arts and culture – are ripe for economisation (Schimank and Volkmann 2012).
The lack of debate about the economisation increasingly visible in museums and the ways in which these processes are changing the physical museum and, in the process, changing us, is exacerbated by our inability to differentiate between museum projects or, more accurately, to identify and articulate the various museum realities increasingly evident in our public museums and to think deeply about the effects of these new museum realities on visitors and on society. Whilst funding and lack of it is relatively easy to discuss, if not to deal with, both design and the built physical museum experience are more difficult to grasp; they involve themselves in our experience in multiple ways, situating us in relation to the world, directing our attention, stimulating feelings and responses and telling us, often in rather unsophisticated ways, who we are and how we should behave. This difficulty is exacerbated by the narratives which circulate around museum design, riddled as they are with subjective statements about success or failure and which still emphasise form and aesthetics or technological ingenuity over human and social relevance and worth. Add to this the fact that design in museums is increasingly
outsourced and is conducted, as a result, as a transaction rather than another aspect of the core work of museums, and it is possible to understand why discussions of design are difficult to escalate to the level of the social and the individual.
Surprisingly, rather than working to trouble and disrupt the social and spatial realities which result when culture is enclosed by the economy or to understand the ways in which we are each positioned differently in these new spatial and social forms and undoubtedly complicated by the contradictory place that museums hold as characteristic institutions of capital, some museums seem content to be complicit in such negative outcomes. These museums are trapped in a mode where competition for funding, for visitors and for economic success, drives their decision-making. Worryingly, there is almost no discussion of how the value of our formal cultural institutions will be lost or the wider losses to people and society that this will inflict, if museums and related cultural organisations – so integral to notions of the shared public realm and as such significant social spaces for the making of meaning and human relations – are given over to making money. If we discard the common nature of museums – their character as common, public spaces and sites of shared endeavour – and allow them to be sites for increasingly economic transactions and corporate power, then we lose so much of ourselves. As difficult as the funding context is, museums need to embrace their role as radical spaces which humanise capital and invest in ‘the fullness of life’ for everyone. To do so involves understanding the significance of the built physical museum, becoming more attentive to the ways in which the marketplace is impacting museum space and experience, and being ready to generate new spatial and social forms across the museum landscape with and for everyone and which, rather, enable our creative lives.
Design for creative lives
Building from Henri Lefebvre’s notion of social space which helps us to understand how our physical and social world is implicated in all aspects of our lives – in who we are and how we feel, think and act –Museums and Design for Creative Lives sets out to reveal the social and human potential of museum space and design by highlighting and analysing a whole series of progressive projects designed with people, meaning making, relationships and multiple subjectivities in mind. In different ways, all of the projects included in the book have sought to harness design towards these ends. In these museums, galleries, heritage sites, exhibitions, projects and programmes, emphasis is placed on our shared human experience, difference is maximised and celebrated, and collections, sites and knowledge are resources to be appropriated to different and varied forms of use and subjective ways of being. Broad in their scope, sometimes these projects are the work of a single visionary and at others they are the outcome of complex visitor-centred, participatory or co-production processes.
Together, the projects, some of which are old and some of which are new, teach us so much about museum design, the ways in which the sensory and physical landscapes of cultural organisations consciously and unconsciously set up very particular social relationships and subject positions, the spatial and social characteristics that projects designed for creative lives exhibit and the changing methodologies of museum design that designing for creative lives increasingly demands. They also reveal how delicate and precious formal cultural spaces designed for learning, creativity, expression and participation are and just how quickly the inclusive and emancipatory moments they create can evaporate as new and competing agendas are allowed to dilute or overwrite the social and the democratic. Many of the examples of museum making documented in Museums and Design for Creative Lives were relatively short lived. Far from perfect, these select projects tell a story of museums and related cultural organisations as institutions dedicated not to exchange and the production of capital and not to the maintenance of dominant cultures or an overdetermined professionalism, but to democracy, public service and the enabling of the creative lives of citizens.
This creative life has little to do with being creative in the artistic and rather elitist sense of the word and everything to do with liberty, democracy and the living of life. In a fascinating book on creativity and democracy in education, Jeff Adams and Allan Owens (2015: 6) distinguish between high creativity, which is elitist and carries within it notions of the exceptional and the gifted and talented, and democratic creativity, which is described simply as ‘the imaginative events and productions of ordinary people’. Drawing on Deleuze, they work to differentiate ‘creativity proper’ from ‘innovation’, ‘the former being a significant event and the latter being what passes for creativity in the routine activity of global capitalism’. Put simply, a creative life is a life where all of us are free to explore ideas, to imagine and express ideas of our own.
In museums, it is fair to say that the valuing and enabling of everyday creativity has not always come to the fore. Paternalistic in their intent, the radicals and progressives who set the liberal foundations of modern museums sought to democratise a ready-made version of culture by making the cultural preferences of the middle classes accessible to everyone else. That said, many museums did include opportunities for citizens to ‘have an idea’. At the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool over the first half of the twentieth century, a whole range of local organisations – the North West Painters’ and Decorators’ Joint Education Committee, for example – made use of the Gallery to gain visibility for and validation of their skill and creativity. The potential embedded in these practices was thwarted by the arrival of the first full-blown professionalising Director at the Gallery in 1952. A great deal of discussion of ‘amateur’ productions followed and led to their gradual and very conscious exclusion from the Gallery as a more singular notion of curatorial expertise took hold and the Walker came to be shaped by a desire to provide access
– through displays and through education programmes – to what was deemed ‘excellent’ (MacLeod 2013: 161).
Despite the fact that museums and related cultural organisations have struggled to rid themselves of the tension between excellence and access and the assumptions about everyday creativity and the ‘needs’ of visitors that sit within such a view (Matarasso 2019), a large body of evidence captures the positive impacts that continue to flow from formal arts and culture provision for those who take part. In the UK, a project exploring the value of culture and the ‘difference to individuals, society and the economy that engagement with arts and culture makes’ drew attention to four contributions of culture: (1) shaping reflective individuals; (2) producing engaged citizens; (3) improving health and well-being; and (4) contributing towards education (Crossick and Kaszynska 2016). Such studies provide evidence of some of the positive ways in which cultural organisations impact the lives of those who take part, though without necessarily shedding light on the limitations, constraints and inequalities built into such provision.
The notion of the creative life also draws on definitions of cultural democracy and the idea that all citizens not only have the right but should also have the means and the opportunity to participate in the cultural life of their community (The Movement for Cultural Democracy 2019; Kelly 1984, 1985; Kelly et al. 1986; Matarasso 2013, 2019). From a cultural democracy perspective, rather than being used to refer to the contents of our cultural institutions (paintings, objects, relics, historic environments), arts and culture are understood as mechanisms for building meaning and experiencing value in everyday life and the social purpose of museums, galleries and heritage sites simply becomes one of enabling (or constraining) the equitable nurturing of these opportunities (Gross and Wilson 2018; Gross et al. 2017). This equal approach to culture celebrates cultural pluralism and acknowledges the direct relationship between freedom to express ourselves culturally and questions of democracy. How, asks Francois Matarasso (2011), can we be expected to represent ourselves politically, if we are unable to represent ourselves culturally? From a cultural democracy perspective then, emphasis is placed on ‘widening or redistributing the means of cultural production – the resources and powers of self-expression, voice and culture-making’ (Gross and Wilson 2018: 2).
The idea of cultural democracy is often presented as a challenge to museums and seen as undermining everything museums, arts and heritage organisations stand for (see, for example, Juncker and Balling 2016). It throws the uneven distribution of power embedded in collections and their interpretation into relief, questions the allocation of cultural funding and raises crucial questions about whom cultural spaces are shaped by and for. Most obviously, it highlights the need for greater participation and a handing over of
control that is difficult for many cultural organisations to imagine (Lynch 2011). As a result, and not discounting the enclaves of power who refuse to change, many museum and heritage professionals worry about how they can move forward and struggle to understand how they can incorporate and respond to criticism without losing what is good about our amazing cultural institutions and the people who work in them.
Thankfully, a more balanced approach, which acknowledges the contradictory histories as well as the positive outcomes of cultural institutions, is beginning to emerge. This more balanced approach seeks solutions rather than pure criticism and analysis and is beginning to establish the far more expansive view that cultural participation ‘exists in many varieties, from being an audience member, to a workshop participant, volunteer or a creative citizen’ and this ‘variety is a continuum, not a dichotomy’ (Gross and Wilson 2018; also see Matarasso 2019). Such views offer a more nuanced way forward which, rather than condemning everything formal cultural spaces do, offers the potential to expand their possibilities for use.
Finally, the notion of a creative life draws on a body of research and practice focused on social responsibility and the power of culture and cultural participation in challenging stigma and intolerance, redefining social relations and shaping a sense of self (Sandell 2007, 2017; Sandell and Nightingale 2012; Janes and Sandell 2019). From this perspective, cultural participation is recognised as informing our values and beliefs and formal cultural institutions are acknowledged as important public arenas through which claims to human rights are negotiated and actively supported. As scholars have noted, for marginalised, oppressed and excluded groups, ‘[p]articipation in the cultural life of the community is not about enjoying the good life. It is an essential safeguard against discrimination and persecution’ (Matarasso 2019: 76).
Of crucial importance here has been the body of activist thought which has emerged from the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, where a mode of museum making has been carefully nurtured whereby the Museum, ‘its exhibitions, programmes and forums, and in its internal processes of negotiation and brokerage … is constantly involved in redefining and reframing its notions of community’ (Rassool 2008: 74). In South Africa, a location where the actions of capital in overwriting and confusing ongoing processes of democracy become especially evident, the District Six Museum has been shaped as ‘a site where post-apartheid identities are being imagined and self-fashioned, and not simply imbibed passively from those that apartheid produced’ (ibid.: 74). Transcending ‘the paradigm of liberal atonement’ (ibid.: 69) and emphasis on paternalism embedded in conventional approaches to museum making, District Six Museum stands as a model of a museum that emerged directly from a community and which, in its prioritisation of
lived experience and habitation of District Six, ‘involves the transformation, through agency, of colonial space into postcolonial life space’ (Layne 2008: 81). Here, then, a creative life is imagined in its fullest humanistic sense as a life lived freely and the need, in what Mark O’Neill (2013) refers to as ‘the necessary context of the market’, for public places where the self-determined search for the fullness of life, whatever that might be, can continue.
All of these ideas sit behind the notion of the creative life and together they introduce a number of important shifts and emphases. First and foremost, they emphasise people and the shared social world in which they live, rather than the museum (collections, priorities, established practices) themselves, as the focus of attention. If, within cultural organisations, we continually talk about abstract notions of social change and impact, the role of ordinary people in that change remains unclear. The notion of a creative life reminds us that society is made up of human beings and is produced through our common values, actions and behaviours, the ‘common moral decencies’ that matter so much in secular democratic societies (Kurtz 1994, 2017). These common moral decencies are shaped by context and lived experience and are acted out within the realms of what is possible at any moment in time. As we know, those values, actions and behaviours will diverge and create points of contention in a pluralistic society and hard-won battles will be fought to gain recognition of new principles and values (Kurtz 2017: 48).
Museums, as public domain institutions established as sites to generate meaning, provide one of a number of shared social spaces –Worpole’s libraries would be another – where these common moral decencies and shared values are actively produced. Museums here are creating the conditions for and providing a tangibly democratic space within which these basic common decencies can ‘emerge in the face to face interactions within a community’ (ibid.). As key and increasingly rare sites for a communal experience that is so very different from the experiences of working and consuming and which necessitate spaces vastly different from the all-pervasive spaces of advanced capitalism, museums and galleries are implicated, always, in these ongoing processes of social production.
The notion of the creative life, then, demands that museums recognise themselves as part of the world and engage, consciously, in what they are already doing – making the world through shifting and unstable combinations of people, stories, objects, spaces and ideas. More specifically, however, the notion of a creative life assumes that museums engage seriously with their roots as ‘countervailing institutions’ (O’Neill 2013) and work to enable equal cultural opportunities for learning, creativity, expression and participation and to amplify everyday creativity. The notion of a creative life purposefully cuts across and is used here (perhaps a little too easily but nonetheless in the spirit of much progressive museum making) to refer to everything that has been shown to flow
from culture and a far more expansive understanding of arts and culture as Francois Matarasso (2019: 76) has phrased it as ‘a vast conversation about everything that concerns [society’s] members’. No single project in the book sums up this approach. As we will see in the range of projects that follow, serving (in an emancipatory way) the world out there can take many forms.
Of importance here are cultural spaces which open up, rather than close down, opportunities for diverse forms of use, varying forms of participation (‘from being an audience member, to a workshop participant, volunteer or a creative citizen’ (Gross and Wilson 2018)) and, importantly, the enabling of multiple subjectivities. As Jonathan Crary (2001) has illustrated, modern, industrialised life has colonised human attention and, rather than being integrated with the natural order, we have become, as Colin Ellard (2015: 50) so brilliantly phrased it, ‘a set of neurological machines honed by our environments to be optimal producers and consumers’. In modern society, we are increasingly directed towards the kind of task-focused attention that supports capital and is not necessarily good for us.
Museums, on the other hand, have an opportunity to work beyond the economic and nurture that part of our creative lives which involves accessing those other parts of our human being – reflection, empathy, care for the collective, awe (the opposite of task-focused attention), imagination, compassion, kindness, sociality, solidarity, curiosity, subjectivity, criticality, connection to nature, happiness and joy, and so on – which feed our human being and enable all of us to play an active part in shaping our shared social world. In museums and at heritage sites, the challenge is to broaden the spatial and social possibilities of cultural spaces so that we might discover not only how museums and related cultural organisations can become ‘democratic participatory platforms for exchanging and negotiating meanings and values’ (Juncker and Balling 2016: 5) but how they can nurture ways of being beyond capital.
Most significantly, perhaps, and inspired directly by the growing literature on cultural democracy, the idea of a creative life holds within it the idea of freedom and the recognition that participation in the cultural life of the community is central to any notion of democracy (The Movement for Cultural Democracy 2019; Matarasso 2011). A creative life is a life free from exclusion and coercion –including coercion by the large corporations – and is intimately tied to our health and happiness. It exists beyond what Aristotle and Arendt referred to as ‘mere life’ and what Marx referred to as a life ‘confined by necessity’ – survival and the generation of wealth – and is, rather, related to the capacity and need for all human beings to explore, to learn, to socialise, to express themselves, to create and to care for one another (Brown 2015: 43). Significantly, as we will see, a creative life demands a different time and rhythm from the space of capital. Museums here have a part to play in countering the
economisation of our public places, by genuinely opening themselves up to co-production and seeking to offer space for human fulfilment.
There is no doubt that in market-led societies, where inequality is always present and which increases as advanced capitalism takes hold, it is of crucial importance that we invest in open and welcoming spaces of human value and meaning, not just for our mental health (Guignon 1999: xii) but for any sense of the public and of the shared and the equal to survive (Crouch 2011; Minton 2012). This is obviously not the sole responsibility of museums, but as institutions which hold so much evidence of human creativity – the objects, languages, stories and ideas which bind us together – and as institutions which were established to counter the negative effects and outcomes of capitalism, museums have a vital role to play in pushing back against the pressures, reductive outcomes and inequalities of advanced capital. They must find a way to hold the space – a space beyond economics and beyond the accumulation and expenditure of wealth – for our creative lives, and shape, with and for all of us, spaces for culture which draw to the surface and enhance our common humanity.
With all this in mind, Museums and Design for Creative Lives asks what can museums and design offer to our sense of humanity and everyday life – and to Worpole’s civic entitlement and democratic exchange –at a moment in history when, as Wendy Brown (2015) has shown, the advancement of neoliberalism, the governing rationality which ‘disseminates market values and metrics to every sphere of life’, means all aspects of life (including non-economic spheres of law, education, healthcare, and arts and culture) are expected to act like businesses and, as human beings, we are no longer conceived of as citizens and are, instead, more and more reduced to human capital. Willing museums to take confident hold of the social impact of built forms, interpretive media and design processes, and to harness museum space as a force for good, Museums and Design for Creative Lives asks: What do we sacrifice when we allow economic imperatives to shape our public museums? What are the larger implications of the new museum realities we make and how might we, instead, design for creative lives?
Ultimately, the book makes a case for cultural organisations to recognise the significance of their spatial and social forms. It raises awareness of the danger of complicity in some of the most pressing social and political problems of our time if we fail to acknowledge the processes changing museums, and argues for an understanding and celebration of a museum tradition which prioritises, instead, investment in our human being, in the collective and in democracy. This tradition recognises the need for new spatial and social forms in museums if we are to move beyond established conventions of museum design and the solidified statements of professional power and pride that came to dominate museums over the course of the twentieth century and now find their equivalents – in terms of lack of
imagination and social irrelevance – in the glint of the spectacular and the commercial.
The book takes a significant lead from philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) and his theorisation of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Driven by a desire to challenge the tendency for philosophers and professionals, including architects, to fragment space, to conceive of space as an empty vessel to be filled and to abstract the discussion and production of space from lived experience, Lefebvre sought to draw attention to the ‘social character of space’, the (unequal) relationships, limited ideologies and passive experiences that social spaces, particularly the spaces of capitalism, are active in creating, and the ‘possible-impossible’, that is the potential for freedom and subjectivity ‘hidden in plain sight’ in even the most compromised of social spaces (ibid.: 27). Across three chapters and a collection of projects, Museums and Design for Creative Lives explores the processes of spatial and social production which result in the economisation of museum space and experience and the context within which these processes have come to be accepted as necessary; and asks how we can, like Lefebvre, look to the past and present for clues as to how we can design, instead, for creative lives.
Starting from Lefebvre and drawing on the work of a whole range of sociologists, environmental psychologists and political economists, Chapter 1 explores ‘the truth of space’ – the involvement of designed and built forms in who we are and what we do, as well as how we think and feel – and problematises the drive towards commercialisation evident in so many physical museum experiences at the current time. Particularly useful here has been Colin Crouch’s (2004) theorisation of post-democracy, the social reality towards which, so Crouch argues, we are in the process of transitioning. What is so interesting is that in a post-democratic society, the institutions of democracy – such as schools, universities and museums – are still present, but their energy and impact is diverted from the realm of democracy towards the benefit of a small political and economic elite. The chapter argues that we can see the beginnings, or, in some cases, reasonably well-developed versions of this new social reality in our public museums. Reiterating the vital function of public museums as ‘countervailing institutions’, the chapter calls for museums to hold tight to and revisit their role as radical spaces which humanise capital and invest in ‘the fullness of life’.
In Chapter 2, and encouraged by Lefebvre to seek an understanding of the relation of particular spatial underpinnings to the social relations they support and bear, it has proved useful to look across the projects in Part 2 of the book and identify the spatial and social strategies utilised repeatedly at cultural sites which emerge from or become embroiled in citizens’ lives and relationships. An attempt to provide a whole series of characteristics which might help us begin to differentiate between physical museum and heritage sites – the good, the bad and the ugly – and provide a starting point for talking
about designing for creative lives, the chapter explores key strategies utilised to shape spaces that are open to multiple forms of appropriation, which purposefully orient visitors away from exchange towards use, and which encourage and enable an awareness of and care for the collective. What becomes clear from the chapter is that in almost all cases, the museums’ makers understood the complex relations between our physical and social worlds and worked to shape spaces to counter, sometimes in very obvious ways, exclusive, oppressive and restricting visions of cultural provision and, in a small number of cases, exclusive, oppressive and restrictive visions of society. The chapter provides a framework for thinking through these ideas.
In Chapter 3, I focus on methods of museum making, exploring the processes, relationships and forms of museum design behind cultural spaces designed for creative lives. For Lefebvre, moving beyond the realm of words and images and into the realm of making spaces together was crucial to the project of spatial and social democracy and the making of a new future together. Only in and through space could progress be made in addressing inequality and challenging the negative and powerful forces of dominated space. The chapter is framed by Lefebvre’s challenge to those with the power to shape space to prioritise forms of making that spring from lived experience and human relations rather than from a technical and bureaucratic process of problem solving. The chapter starts from Lefebvre’s method of transduction; a research-led and collaborative process for making space and society. Transduction starts from the Utopian imagining of a ‘possible-object’, concrete analyses of the present reality and successful precedents from the past and is developed through a whole series of collaborative methods for imagining, producing and testing new spatial and social forms together. Lefebvre’s thoughts on transduction both provide the impetus for this book and some of my own practice-based explorations and an interesting lens through which to view the range of design methodologies utilised across the case studies. The chapter distinguishes between four modes of museum making in socially engaged museums. Whilst all four modes of making have resulted in incredible spatial and social landscapes and provide methods of design that can be reused and rethought in new contexts, a small number of approaches – described here as co-production – go much further in challenging and remaking the museum as institution. Indeed, in these spaces, the institution thins and the ‘possibleobject’ becomes a world of human relations and support, a landscape of potential. In the final pages of Chapter 3, I draw together the threads from the discussion and share some of the key themes and approaches to emerge across the book.
Part 2 provides 28 illustrated case studies of design for creative lives which span 70 years and are drawn from a range of international contexts. Presented in simple alphabetical order, the case studies are a resource for others to analyse and add to. Together, the projects –
drawn from museums, galleries, heritage and theatre – create an inspirational lineage of design for museum makers today and an optimistic picture of what the future of museum design and museum visiting could involve. The projects illustrate the brilliance of human creativity and the pathos and beauty of a field of practice given over to investing in the complex and often challenging lives of human beings. This is the tradition that we need to understand and no matter how difficult the present economic and political context might be, this is the tradition that we need now to identify, amplify and extend. For Lefebvre, one route to understanding the spatial and social forms conducive to happiness was to look to the past – ‘the traces of alternatives persisting in memory’ (Coleman 2015: 42) – for sources of what worked previously and why. Interestingly, Lefebvre asked questions of these successful examples and we need to do the same by locating inspiring examples of museum spaces shaped with people, human meaning making, ways of being and social bonds in mind. ‘What are the times and rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these “successful” spaces favourable to happiness?’, Lefebvre asked. ‘That is interesting.’
notes
1 In much of what follows I use the terms economisation and commercialisation. Commercialisation denotes a series of practices which are premised on ‘the assumption that the quality of public services will be improved if the existing practices and ethos of public service are replaced by those typical of commercial practice’ (Crouch 2003: 4). Subtly different from commercialisation, economisation denotes ‘the processes through which behaviours, organizations, institutions and, more generally, objects are constituted as being “economic”’ (Çalışkan and Callon 2010). I don’t use the term privatisation, which describes a process by which assets are transferred into private hands, as this generally does not describe what is currently happening in museums in liberal democracies.
2 This observation is based on analysis of the design brief (https:// effectivedesign.org.uk/sites/default/files/9.0.2%20Universal%20 Design%20Studio%20&%20Map.pdf ) as well as observation of the entrance sequence. During a visit in February 2018 I spent some time observing visitors move through the sequence and was approached by a member of staff who asked me if I needed help. I explained that I was interested in the entrance sequence to which they replied, ‘Brilliant – are you going to change it? Do you have any power? It doesn’t work.’
3 Statoil changed its name to Equinor in 2018.
PART 1 Museums and creative lives
design for
The economisation of museums and the ‘truth of space’
On 1 November 2015, Launchpad, a gallery at the Science Museum in London dedicated to fun and active science learning for children and with exquisite collective use interactives such as the Big Machine (where a group of children have to work together to make the machine work), closed ahead of its redevelopment as Wonderlab (Science Museum Blog 2015). News of the closure and redevelopment, released in 2014 (Gosling 2014), generated very few responses, which is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the long history of the gallery; Launchpad had been redeveloped a number of times since its inception in 1986. Its lineage reached back to experiments with children’s galleries at the Museum in the 1930s (the Museum opened its first Children’s Gallery in 1931) through the visit of the Ontario Science Circus to the Museum in 1981 and experiments with Discovery Galleries in the school holidays immediately following (Bunney 2010). At the heart of all of these developments had been a desire to demythologise science and open up the possibility of learning about science to all children by providing entry-points into the formality of science education. The Museum’s early success in this is evidenced by reports of unaccompanied children arriving at the Children’s Gallery in the 1930s (ibid.). The new plans, for Wonderlab to be developed by muf art/ architecture, a practice with a strong reputation for prioritising the social and the public, seemed exciting and full of potential (Watkins 2014).
In June 2016, a good way in to the redevelopment, the Science model and in order to enable more free school visits. Tickets would Museum announced that Wonderlab would be branded ‘the Statoil cost £6 for a child and £8 for an adult. This time, the announcements Gallery’1 in recognition of one of its funders and that it would be generated significant news coverage and debate. Numerous visitors placed behind a paywall as a route to a more sustainable funding to the museum voiced their concerns about the introduction of
charges on top of travel and food costs as well as the unfairness of entrance fees for parents with young children and disabled children who may only want to spend a small amount of time in the gallery (Parker and Macrae 2016; Tincture of Museums 2016). If for some the Science Museum was forgetting its responsibility to be inclusive and open up exhibitions at the Museum to the widest possible audience (Dawson 2016), for others the decision to place Wonderlab behind a paywall was ‘the beginning of a slippery slope to two tier museum access’ (Tincture of Museums 2016).
The protests continued at the VIP opening of Wonderlab on 16 October that same year when Art-not-Oil and a collective of climate change activists staged a protest displaying their own modified Wonderlab posters and pouring oil around a model oil-rig placed on a white carpet to represent the Arctic, the site of Statoil’s latest explorations. Following the protest, a petition was set up online demanding that the Museum reconsider both the entry charge and the oil sponsorship. The petition very quickly amassed over 40,000 signatures. On the ‘ethical contradictions’ that the project seemed to suggest to many outsiders, Chris Garrard (2016), a member of ArtNot-Oil, penned a public criticism of the Museum in the Guardian, pointing out the retrograde step of associating the future of science with fossil fuels ‘at a time when society and policy makers have finally accepted that it is not compatible with a sustainable future and a stable climate’. Most recently, an open letter willing the Science Museum to end its association with oil was signed by some 50 scientists and environmentalists (Picheta 2018).
Throughout the protests, the debates and the news coverage, the museum has maintained a consistent line. In fact just one week after the opening of Wonderlab, Ian Blatchford, the Science Museum’s director, issued a robust defence of the Museum’s actions suggesting that the only choices the Museum had for Launchpad were either to introduce entry charges or watch its gradual decline (Blatchford 2016b; see also 2016a). ‘Ticket income will go’, he argued,
towards the, frankly very high, cost of running and maintaining this interactive space and, most importantly, this sustainable funding model enables us to waive the charge for this inspirational experience for school children, who are our most diverse and demographically representative audience.
The Museum has maintained this line of reasoning since.
Whilst the discussions about entry charges and oil sponsorship rumble on and whilst the Museum maintains its stance, what feels most evident to a regular visitor to the Science Museum is the dramatic change in space and experience that a form of decision-making shaped by economic imperatives and dominated by corporate imagery has triggered. Visiting Wonderlab is a vastly different experience from visiting Launchpad and it is clear that this redevelopment is of a
fundamentally different variety from previous Launchpad redevelopments. Since 2007, Launchpad had occupied the third floor of the Museum in a large open space (Figure 1.1). The small pop-up café at the entrance to the gallery (a refuge for exhausted parents and carers) acted as the marker that families and groups had arrived and one would invariably see children breaking away from their groups and running into the gallery space from this point. Brightly lit with its colourful, functional and robust aesthetic, Launchpad looked like a fun mechanical laboratory and it was, for many years, an educational playground for children and their carers. Always busy, it could at times be overwhelming, a hive of activity centred around highlights such as the Big Machine and the Water Rocket demonstration which would see a plastic bottle shoot across the Gallery with a great pop! Visits for my family were always long, active, full of chat, and both exhausting and highly memorable (Figure 1.2).
Almost the opposite of Launchpad, a visit to Wonderlab is characterised more by constraints and challenges than it is by excitement and experimentation. Timed tickets must either be booked in advance or bought on the day from a kiosk outside the entrance to the gallery; on the day we visited the queue was long and it took 40 minutes to secure our tickets. Accessing the gallery involves joining a second queue underneath the Statoil branding from which visitors are allowed in on a one in/one out basis. Once inside, visitors are faced with a spectacular scene; a large dimly lit space full of sparkle, many of the same interactives from Launchpad (though not, sadly, the Big Machine) and some fabulous new additions such as the friction slides (only accessible, though, via stairs and again involving a queue and, this time, a turnstile) and a giant interactive representation of the solar system. On our visit in October 2017, the dimmed light forced us to move around quite slowly, to peer, and ensured that we constantly worked hard to locate where we were in the gallery. The experience was tiring and we exited – happy enough, though £28 poorer – just 40 minutes later.
The differences between Launchpad and Wonderlab couldn’t be starker. Whereas Launchpad was bright, open, practical, robust and energising, Wonderlab is spectacular, closed, dark, precious and tiring. If in Launchpad we felt that the interactives and knowledge within were for us, in Wonderlab we gingerly took part, experiencing the different elements where we could. Whereas in Launchpad we propelled ourselves in according to the level of energy we had that day (with members of our party moving in and out and taking tea breaks at the pop-up café as required!), in Wonderlab we were corralled and allowed access when our slot became available. Sadly, there was no raucous enjoyment. And whereas in Launchpad we felt like citizens with a right to access our Museum, a right to knowledge, a right to be a scientist and the right to access the gallery on our own terms and as part of our own complex lives, in Wonderlab we were unquestionably consumers, allowed to immerse ourselves in the mystery of science because we bought the ticket and another paying guest had exited.
Would we have felt differently about the experience in Wonderlab and embraced it more fully if we hadn’t had to queue, if we hadn’t had to pay, if we could have moved in and out freely, and if the gallery hadn’t been branded as the Statoil Gallery? Very possibly. If the entry charges exclude many, the larger economic framing of Wonderlab results in very particular spatial and social forms (queues, turnstiles, enclosure, passivity, reliance on others, an urgency to move on, and so on). Each of these elements placed very specific physical demands on our group, narrowed our experience and amplified the sense of spectacle, consumption and constraint. Whilst the defence that funding is sparse and must come from somewhere has to be taken seriously (even if the ‘corporate sponsorship and entrance fees or gradual decline’ narrative is less convincing), what is clear is that as soon as economic imperatives take over and become the defining frame for museum development, the visitor experience is changed.
Other changes have taken place at the Science Museum in recent years that also alter the character of public space, challenge the ideal of museums as places of wonder and public trust, and narrow the range of experiences open to visitors. In 2012, the Museum introduced a new entrance sequence designed by Universal Design
Studio and MAP. Described rather awkwardly by the designers as ‘a beautiful barrier’ and the direct result of a drive to encourage visitors to donate, the entrance has been reshaped to push visitors through one of two narrow touchpoints where they are encouraged to give money to the Museum (Universal Design Studio 2013). At exactly the point where visitors should be transitioning into the world of science and experimentation, they are channelled into a spatial arrangement which speaks to them purely as a potential source of income. Anecdotes abound of people who, unsure whether they have to pay, end up giving money to enter this free museum.2
On the day that we visited in October 2017, high numbers of visitors were entering the Museum. In order to maintain the new spatial and social dynamic as visitors streamed in, one member of the Museum team stood by the barrier shouting loudly and using his arms (rather like traffic police) to direct visitors through the two small gaps. The experience – jumbled and noisy – was unpleasant and stressful for all. However, unlike the experience of being a consumer in Wonderlab where image and spectacle reign supreme, here we experienced cold pragmatics – the brute survival of a cultural organisation. An image of life to be avoided at all costs – and a dire warning of how grim our
Figure 1.1 Launchpad, Science Museum, London. Image: Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library.
shared social world will be if we allow our public spaces to be shaped by economics alone – this is a space where any notion of ‘the fullness of life’ is purposefully abandoned to facilitate monetary exchange.
How can we understand these physical traces of economisation in museums and the new spatial and social realities they create? How do they relate to larger economic and political dynamics in society and why and how do these dynamics play out in the space of the museum? Why, in a climate where we are told there is no alternative, should we pay attention to these new spatial and social forms and what are their implications for our shared social world? Chapter 1 explores these questions and makes the case for a closer look at museum space and the importance of generating a form of museum design suitable to the task at hand; the shaping of our public life and the
Museums and the ‘truth of space’ |
shaping of ourselves. Drawing on a body of research from sociology, philosophy, architecture, environmental psychology, museum studies and political economy, the chapter explores the ways in which the built and designed forms of museums – from their location in the urban structure through to their architectures, exhibitions and displays – are embroiled in our experience influencing not only how we behave, but also how we think and how we feel. Drawing attention to the new museum realities which emerge as public services, such as museums, are diverted from the realm of democracy towards the realm of economics, the chapter argues for a deeper understanding of museums as vital ‘countervailing institutions’, alongside other public spaces and services, in a context where, crucially, all space is already the space of capital.
The producTion of space: The ‘TruTh of space’ and builT forms
Any attempt to understand how space and society are intertwined and why we see the physical traces and feel the outcomes of the economisation of cultural work in our experiences, must start from Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) and his investigation of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). Lefebvre famously argued that ‘(social) space is a (social) product’, a view which tells us that rather than being something out there, disconnected from human being, or an empty vessel to be filled, space is made and it is social; it is produced through our human being and action over time from the worldwide scale of territories to the minute scale of the everyday (ibid.: 26). A product of society, space embodies the multiple social structures, relationships, dominant ideologies and values of that society and is, as a result, constantly informing our interactions with others as well as the way we feel, think and act. Social space then, is ‘a tool of thought and action’ (ibid.: 26; see also Hillier and Tzortzi 2006: 283) and to shape space is to shape both people and society.
In order to help us understand how social space is produced and to recognise both its complexity and its potential, Lefebvre elaborated a ‘unitary triad’; a description of three different ‘moments’ active in the production of space (Figure 1.3). The triad draws the actions and schisms of social space to our attention and speaks to their implication in questions of human experience as well as social and spatial justice. As Schmid (2008) has unpicked so thoroughly, Lefebvre described each of the three moments of the triad in two ways and it is this ‘double nature’ that is key to its understanding.
First, Lefebvre identified a three-dimensional and all-encompassing language of space comprising; spatial practice, representations of space and spaces of representation Spatial practice refers to the material places, spatial configurations and social practices that structure routine and regulate life; the spaces, social activities and interactions evident in the world (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 33).
Figure 1.2 Frances MacLeod in Launchpad, 2012. Image: Suzanne MacLeod.
Variously described as ‘an interlinking chain or network of activities or interactions which on their part rest upon a determinate material basis (morphology, built environment)’ (Schmid 2008: 37) and ‘the cohesive patterns and places of social activity … perceived in the everyday acts of buying, playing, traveling, and laboring, as much as in the everyday spaces of the home, office, school, and streets’ (Gieseking and Mangold 2014), spatial practice establishes social norms and ensures social cohesion (Merrifield 1993: 524). We need to be able to decipher the physical and social space of spatial practice to operate successfully within it (Zieleniec 2018: 6).
Spatial practice exists in contradiction to representations of space, Lefebvre’s second moment in the language of space. Representations of space refer to the abstract representations imagined by disciplines and professions such as scientists, planners, architects and geographers (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 38). These abstract representations – ideas, words, plans, designs, drawings and maps –provide the dominant ready-made knowledge about space, the codes and signs that organise and direct spatial practice. The isolation of representations of space as a significant category in the language of space draws attention to those with the power and authority to define space and direct social action. It links the practice of designing space to ideology and the conscious or unconscious work of those who represent the world in maintaining structures and beliefs which oppress and control (Zieleniec 2018: 6).
Finally, the third moment in the language of space is spaces of representation. Spaces of representation describe the symbolic values
created by the inhabitants of space, where, based on representations of space and at the level of lived experience, meaning is conveyed and norms and experiences are expressed (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 38; Schmid 2008: 37). Spaces of representation are loaded with ideas, symbols and relationships – god, or masculine and feminine, for example – which emerge from lived experience. For Lefebvre, space and society are produced (in part) through this language of space –through the continual interplay between spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation.
In addition to identifying the language of space, Lefebvre drew attention to the phenomenology of space. He understood that we access space through our bodies and, through the inhabitation and sensing of space, we learn how to act and play our part in the production of our social world. As a result, Lefebvre co-locates our sense of the world and our part in producing the world with his language of space (Schmid 2008). Here, space is at once perceived, conceived and lived.
Space as it is perceived describes our sensory perception of the material (physical and social) underpinnings (spatial practices) that make up the world. We build our perception of the world from sensing (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting) these material elements. Space as it is perceived informs the use of appropriate actions and behaviours. It also impacts how we feel – whether we feel that we belong or feel that we are out of place or unwelcome. Space as it is conceived, on the other hand, describes our conception of the endless representations of space (images as well as the world we see in front of us) that dominate our lives and provide us with the rules and codes of society. The notion of conceived space highlights the fact that our perception is never pure but is always informed by what we already know and by what has already been thought for us.
Finally, space as it is lived describes the lived space of everyday life. Lived space is increasingly dominated by powerful representations and is, as a result, more and more passively experienced. Yet, as the space of lived and bodily experience, lived space is also the space of becoming – of felt experiences, dreams and desires – of representational spaces shaped through life. The result of human action, imagination, resistance and authentic lived experiences can flourish in lived space. Importantly for cultural organisations that aspire to be living organisations which enable people to generate significance in their lives, authentic lived experiences emerge in moments where personal knowledge, relationships and identities break through the dominant representations of space and offer up a sense of the ‘possibilities immanent in the present’ (Pinder 2013: 32).
Key to understanding the triad and the ways in which social space is produced through the complex of actions and relations it describes, is an understanding of Lefebvre’s dialectics (Schmid 2008). It is
Figure 1.3 Henri Lefebvre’s Unitary Triad.
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them, and obtained sufficient for his purpose. Some of them he pounded between stones and placed upon the wound, others he ate. So in a short time he found himself so much recovered as to commence his journey. With his bow and arrows he killed birds in the day, which he roasted before the fire at night. In this way he kept hunger from him until he came to a water that separated his wife and friends from him. He then gave that whoop which says a friend is returned. The signal was instantly known, and a canoe came to bring him across; and soon the chief was landed amidst many shouts. Then he called his people to his lodge, and told them all that happened. Then ever after it was resolved to build a fire by the dead warrior, that he might have light and warmth, if he only dreamed as the chief had dreamed.”
The Indians of Natchez carried to a still higher point their profound veneration for those who were no more. At the funerals of their relatives or friends they gave unequivocal signs of extreme and most sincere grief. They did not burn the body, like the Greeks, the Romans, and several American nations, but they placed it for a time in a coffin of reed, and regularly brought it food in token of their love and solicitude. This they continued till nothing remained of the body but dry bones, which were then collected and placed in the funeral temple. These temples of the dead only differed from the ordinary dwellings of the Natchez in having a wooden head suspended over the entrance door. Nothing could surpass their attachment to these relics of the departed beings they had lost, and when they emigrated they generally carried away the bones of their ancestors.
The interment of their sovereigns, or one of his near relations, assumed with the Natchez the proportions of a public calamity Such funereal ceremonies were accompanied by a real voluntary massacre, in which a multitude of individuals allied to the family of the deceased, his friends or servants, were immolated. We will give, still through the Abbé Dominech, a few examples of this custom, by citing some details related in history concerning the death of the “Stung Serpent,” brother of the “Great Sun.” As the number of victims to be sacrificed during the funeral ceremony was very considerable, the officers of Port Rosalie repaired to the village
where the deceased had dwelt, in order to save from death as many people as they could. Thanks to the charitable intervention of the French, the number of victims was limited to the two wives of the deceased, the chamberlain, physician, servant, pipe-bearer, and a remarkably beautiful young Indian girl, who had loved him greatly, and some old women, who were to be strangled near the mortal remains of the noble dead.
The body of the “Stung Serpent” was clothed in beautiful garments, and placed on a bed of state; his face was painted vermilion, on his feet were beautiful embroidered mocassins, and on his head he wore a crown of red and white feathers, as a prince of blood. By his side was placed his gun, his pistol, his bow and a quiver full of arrows, and his best tomahawk, with all the calumets of peace which had been offered to him during his life. At the head of the bed was a red pole supporting a chain of reeds also painted red, and composed of forty-six rings, indicating the number of enemies he had killed in battle.
All the persons composing the household surrounded the deceased, serving him from time to time as when in life; but as of course all the food remained untouched, his servant called out, “Why do you not accept our offerings? Do you no longer love your favourite meats? Are you angry with us, and will you allow us no longer to serve you? Ah! you speak to us no more as you used to do. You are dead! all is finished! Our occupation is ended; and since you abandon us, we will follow you to the land of spirits.” Then the servant uttered the death shout, which was repeated by all present, and spread from village to village to the farthest extremities of the country like a tremendous funeral echo.
The beautiful young Indian, who would not survive her lover, raised her voice in the midst of the general lamentations, and, addressing the officers, said, “Chiefs and nobles of France, I see how much you regret my husband. His death is indeed a great calamity for you, as well as for your nation, for he carried them all in his heart. How he has left us for the world of spirits; in two days I shall be with him, and I will tell him that your hearts swelled with sadness at the sight of his mortal remains. When I am no more,
remember that our children are orphans, remember that you loved their father, and let the dew of your friendship fall in abundance on the children of him who was friendly to you.”
The following day the grand master of the ceremonies came to fetch the victims for the death dance, and led them in procession to the place where they were to die. Each of them was accompanied by eight of his nearest relatives, who were to perform the office of executioners: one carried a tomahawk, and threatened every instant to strike the victim; another carried the mat on which the sacrifice was to be made; a third the cord which was to serve for the execution; a fourth bore the deer skin which was to be placed on the head and shoulders of the condemned; the fifth carried a wooden bowl containing the pills of tobacco which the patient swallowed before dying; the sixth an earthen bottle full of water, to facilitate the passage of the pills. The office of the last two was to render the strangulation as speedy as possible, by drawing the cord to the right and to the left of the patient.
These eight persons became noble after the execution: they walked two and two after the victims, whose hair was painted red. On arriving at the public place where the temple stood, all began to shout out the death cry; the persons who were to be sacrificed placed themselves on the mats, and danced the death dance. Their executioners formed a circle round them, and danced the same dance; then all returned in procession to the cabin of the deceased.
The inauspicious day of the funeral ceremony having arrived, the legitimate wife of the “Stung Serpent” took leave of her children with the following words. “The death of your father is a great loss. He wills that I accompany him into the world of spirits, and I must not let him wait for me in vain. I am in haste to depart, for since his death I walk the earth with a heavy step. You are young, my children; you have before you a long path, which you must pursue with a prudent spirit and a courageous heart. Take care you do not tear your feet on the thorns of duplicity and the stones of dishonesty. I leave you the keys of your father’s inheritance, brilliant and without rust.”
The body of the prince was borne by eight guardians of the temple, and preceded by a multitude of warriors, who, in walking, described continual circles until they reached the temple where the body of the “Stung Serpent” was deposited. The victims, after having been strangled according to custom, were buried in the following order: the two widows in the same tomb as their husband, the young Indian woman to the right of the temple, and the chamberlain to the left. The other bodies were removed to the different villages to which they belonged. Then the dwelling of the “Stung Serpent” was fired, and burnt to its foundations. Such were the barbarous and touching ceremonies observed by the Natchez on the death of the highest dignitaries of their ancient nation.
Dacotah Chief
CHAPTER XXIX.
Funeral rites in Damara land The Koossan method of disposing of the dead The grave in the cattle fold No recovering spilt water Coming out of mourning No half mourning among savages The feast of release The slave barracoon A thousand skeletons The mortal remains of a Bechuana The burying ground at Fetich Point The grave of old King Pass-all A Barrodo Beondo funeral The late King Jemmy Respect of the Timannees for their dead A Religious impostor A funeral at Mandingo Strange behaviour of the mourners
By whose “Griffee” did you die? Burial of King Archibongo His devil-house Funeral ceremonies in Madagascar How the poor Malagasey is disposed of “Take that for dying” Sepulchral rites in Abyssinia—Burying in Sambo land—The demon “Wulasha”—Blood rule in Dahomey The very last grand custom Devil’s work How a Dahoman king is buried A pot for the king’s bones
mong the Damaras of South Africa the mode of disposing of the dead is somewhat different from that practised by those who dwell in the more remote parts of that country. Andersson tells us, that in the case of the Damara, as soon as he dies (sometimes, indeed, it is horridly rumoured, before animation has ceased), his nearest kinsfolk fetch a big stone and break the backbone, the more conveniently to bundle and tie him nose and knees together. This accomplished, the body is wrapped in the hide of an ox, a hole dug in the earth, and the defunct squatted in with his face towards the north. This is done, say the natives, to remind them where they originally came from.
When a poor Bechuana or Damara woman, having a helpless baby, dies, it is no uncommon thing for the little creature to be placed with her alive in the hole dug for the reception of the adult body. Mr. Rath, a missionary, happened on one occasion to approach a burial party at which this atrocity was about to be committed, and was successful in releasing the poor little thing.
“After having consigned the remains of a chief to his last resting-place,” says Andersson, “they collect his arms, war-dress, etc., and suspend them to a pole or to a tree at the head of the grave. The horns of such oxen as have been killed in commemoration of the occasion are hung up in a like manner. The tomb consists of a large heap of stones surrounded by thorn bushes, no doubt to keep hyænas and other carnivorous animals from extracting the corpse. Sometimes, however, the chief, should he
have expressed a wish to that effect, instead of being buried is placed in a reclining position on a slightly raised platform in the centre of his own hut, which in such a case is surrounded by stout and strong palisadings.
Damara Tomb
“When a chief feels his dissolution approaching, he calls his sons to his bedside and gives them his benediction, which consists solely in wishing them an abundance of the good things of this world. The eldest son of the chief’s favourite wife succeeds his father; and as soon as the obsequies are over he quits the desolate spot, remaining absent for years. At last, however, he returns, and immediately proceeds to his parent’s grave, where he kneels down, and in a whispering voice tells the deceased that
he is there with his family and the cattle that he gave him. He then prays for a long life; also that his herds may thrive and multiply: and, in short, that he may obtain all those things that are dear to a savage. This duty being performed, he constructs a kraal on the identical spot where once the ancestral camp stood; even the huts and the fireplaces are placed as near as possible in their former position.
“The flesh of the first animal slaughtered here is cooked in a particular vessel; and when ready the chief hands a portion of it to every one present. An image consisting of two pieces of wood, supposed to represent, the household deity, or rather the deified parent, is then produced and moistened in the platter of each individual. The chief then takes the image, and after affixing a piece of meat to the upper end of it, he plants it in the ground on the identical spot where the parent was accustomed to sacrifice. The first pail of milk produced from the cattle is also taken to the grave; a small quantity is also poured over the ground, and a blessing asked on the remainder.
Among the Koossas, a tribe of South African natives, as soon as they perceive a sick man near his end, he is carried from his hut to some solitary spot beneath the shade of a tree. A fire is then made, and a vessel and water set near him. Only the husband or wife, or some near relation, remains with him. If he appear dying, water is thrown over his head, in hopes of its reviving him; but should this fail, and it becomes apparent that death is approaching, he is left by everybody but his wife; or should the sick person be a woman, then it is her husband alone who stays with her. The relations, however, do not retire to their homes; they gather at a distance, and from time to time the dying person’s nurse calls out and lets them know how matters are progressing, till comes the final announcement “he is dead.” When all is over, the dead man’s relatives proceed to the nearest stream, and, having purified themselves, return home.
The wife, however, who must pay the last duties to her husband, cannot do this. She leaves the body, about which no one is any longer solicitous, to become a prey to beasts and birds, and goes with a firebrand taken from the fire that had been kindled near the dying man, to some other solitary place, where she again makes a fire, and though it should rain ever so hard, she must not suffer it to be extinguished. In the night she comes secretly to the hut where she had lived with her husband, and burns it, and then returns back to her solitude, where she must remain a month entirely secluded from the world, and living the whole time
on roots and berries. When this period of solitary mourning has expired, she divests herself of her clothes, which she destroys, bathes, lacerates her breasts and her arms with a sharp stone, and having made her a long petticoat of rushes returns at sunset to the kraal.
At her desire a youth of the tribe brings her a lighted firebrand, and exactly on the spot where her husband’s hut formerly stood she builds a fire; some one of her tribe then brings her some new milk, with which she rinses her mouth, and she is then acknowledged as completely purified, and is received once more among her relations and friends. Singularly enough, however, the cow from which the milk is drawn is, on the contrary, rendered impure, and though not killed, is neglected entirely and left to die a natural death. The day following the widow’s return an ox is killed, and after feasting on its flesh, the skin is given to her to make her a new mantle. Immediately after this her sisters-in-law assist her in building a new hut, and she is completely reinstated in social life.
A widower has nearly the same mourning ceremonies to observe, only with this difference, that his seclusion lasts but half a month. He then throws his garments away and prepares himself a new garment from the skin of an ox. He takes besides the hair the tail of the ox, with which he makes himself a necklace and wears it as long as it will last. If a person dies suddenly the whole colony will shift, judging that no further luck will attend them if they stay, and the body of the suddenly defunct is allowed to remain exactly as it fell, and with the hut for its sepulchre. If, however, the individual suddenly dying is a young child, impurity is supposed to attach only to the hut in which it died, and which is either pulled down or closed up for ever.
It is only the chiefs and their wives who are buried. They are left to die in their huts; the corpse is then wrapped in the folds of their mantle and a grave is dug in the cattle-fold. After the earth is thrown in some of the oxen are driven into the fold and remain there, so that the earth is entirely trodden down and indistinguishable from the rest. The oxen are then driven out; but they by this process become sacred oxen, and must by no man be slain for his eating.
The widows of the deceased have all the household utensils which they and their husbands had used together; and after remaining three days in solitude purify themselves according to the usual manner They then each kill an ox, and each makes herself a new mantle of its hide. The kraal is then entirely deserted by the tribe and is never chosen as a building site,
even though it be highly eligible and the horde in search of a site is entirely unknown to that belonging to which the chief died. A chief whose wife dies has the same ceremonies to observe as any other man, excepting that with him the time of mourning is only three days. The place where the wife of a chief is buried is forsaken in the same manner as in the case of the chief himself.
The Koossas have no priests or religious ceremonies, and consequently but few traditions. They know of no power superior to that with which ordinary mortals are invested except that professed by enchanters, which are of two sorts—good and bad; the former being the more powerful and able to frustrate the designs of the latter, provided that he be called on in time and the transaction be made worth his while. The Koossan enchanters are, as a rule, old women—poor wretches who, doubtless, finding themselves past labour and objects of contempt and impatience among their tribe, avail themselves of their long experience of the weaknesses and superstitions of those by whom they are surrounded, and boldly set up as witches as the most certain means of gaining not only the goodwill of the people but also their awe and respect.
Should a Koossan find himself at what he has reason to suspect to be death’s door, he sends for an enchantress. The “magic woman,” after hearing his case—never mind what it may be—proceeds to cure him; she makes some pellets of cow-dung, and laying them in rows and circles upon the man’s stomach, chants certain mysterious airs and dances and skips about him; after a while she will make a sudden dart at her patient and hold up to her audience a snake or a lizard, which the said audience is to infer was at that moment, through her force of magic, extracted from the seat of the patient’s ailment. If the sick man should die the excuse is that the appointed time of life had expired and that “there was no recovering spilled water,” or else she puts a bold face on the matter and declares that at least two evil enchanters were working against her, and that against such odds success was hopeless. In his dealings with these enchanters, however, the Koossan has this substantial security that no stone will be left unturned to effect his cure—the fee is agreed on beforehand and posted with a friend; should the patient grow well the friend delivers the ox, or whatever the fee may consist of, to the doctress; if the patient should die, or after a reasonable time find himself no better for the old lady’s services, he fetches home his ox and there is an end to the matter
If, however, the patient be an exacting individual and inclined to avail himself to the fullest of Koossan law, he, although quite restored to health through the witch’s agency, may still refuse to pay her her fee till she discovers and brings to justice the person who enchanted him. As this, however, is a mere matter of hard swearing, combined with a little discrimination in the selection of the victim, the witch-doctress is seldom averse to undertake this latter business. The whole tribe is collected on a certain day, and in their midst a hut is built. To this hut the witch retires on the pretence that before she can reveal the name of the malefactor she must sleep, that he may appear before her in a dream. The people without in the meantime dance and sing for a while, till at length the men go into the hut and beg the enchantress to come forward. At first she hesitates; but they take her a number of assagais as a present, and in a little while she makes her appearance with the weapons in her hand. While staying in the hut she has busied herself in painting her body all sorts of colours, and with scarcely any other covering she stalks into the midst of the assembled throng.
With loud compassion for her nudity the people hasten to pluck their ox-hide mantles from their own shoulders and cast them on those of the witch, till she is nearly overwhelmed by these demonstrations of their solicitude. Suddenly, however, she starts up, flings off the cover of mantles, and makes a rush towards a certain man or woman, striking him or her with the bundle of assagais. For the unlucky wretch to protest his innocence it is utterly useless. The rabble, chafing like other beasts, seizes the evil doer and impatiently await the good witch’s decision as to what had best be done with him—whether, for instance, he shall be buried under an ant heap or put in a hole in the ground and covered with large hot stones. Should the ant hill be his doom, lingering torture and death are certain; but if he be a very strong man he may resist the hot stone torture, and when night arrives may force the terrible weights from off him, and dragging his poor scorched body out of the hole make his escape. Never again, however, must he venture among the people, who in all probability number among them his wife and children; for should he do so he would be executed off hand and his body thrown out to the hyænas.
In certain parts of the interior of Africa the custom of “waking” the defunct is ordinarily practised. Du Chaillu had a serving man named Tonda, and one day Tonda died, and the traveller having a suspicion of the ceremony that would be performed visited the house of Tonda’s mother, where the body lay. The narrow space of the room was crowded;
about two hundred women were sitting and standing around, singing mourning songs to doleful and monotonous airs. “They were so huddled together that for a while I could not distinguish the place of the corpse. At last some moved aside, and behold! the body of my friend. It was seated in a chair, dressed in a black tail coat and a pair of pantaloons, and wore round its neck several strings of beads. Tonda’s mother approaching her dead son, prostrated herself before him and begged him to speak to her once more. A painful silence followed the of course fruitless adjuration; but presently it was broken by the loud hopeless wailing uttered by the bereaved woman, the rest of the company making dolorous chorus.”
African Wake
The savages of Central Africa do not wear black for their departed relatives, unless indeed an accumulative coat of dirt may be so called; for it is a fact that among these people the way to express extreme sorrow is to go unwashed and very dirty. Besides, they wear about their bodies any ragged cloth that comes handy, and altogether evidently endeavour to convey the idea that now so-and-so is dead their relish for life is at an end, and that the frivolous question of personal appearance is no longer worth discussing. To their credit be it named, however, they are not guilty of the monstrous civilized custom of half-mourning. They don’t immediately on the death of a friend don attire and virtually proclaim, “See how sorry I am!—see my jetty gown or coat and the black studs in my shirt-front!” nor do they, when the deceased has passed away three months or less, streak their black with white and proclaim, “I am a little more cheerful—you may see how much by the breadth of the white stripe in my ribands.” The African is happily ignorant of these grades of grief; when he sorrows he sorrows to the very dust, but between that mood and boisterous merriment is with him but a single skip. Thus when the mourning period has expired (it varies from one to two years) a day is appointed for the breaking-up of mourning-time and a return to the bright side of the world. The friends and relatives and the widows (there are often six or seven of them) come in gangs of ten or a dozen from villages far off—some by the road, and some in their canoes, and none emptyhanded. Each one is provided with a jar of mimbo or palm wine, and something that will make a row—gunpowder, kettles with round stones to shake in them, drums, tom-toms, and whistles made of reed. The row is the leading feature of the breaking-up, and is called bola woga. Virtually the mourning is over the evening before the ceremony commences, for the company have all arrived, as has the dead man’s heir (who, by-the-by, can, if he chooses, claim and take home every widow on the establishment), and the bereaved wives, albeit as yet uncleansed from their long-worn and grimy mourning suit, are full of glee and giggle, and have pleasant chat among themselves concerning the gay rig out they will adopt to-morrow
To-morrow comes. Early in the morning the village is informed that the widows are already up and have already partaken of a certain magic brew that effectually divorces them from their weeds. The gun firing is likewise the signal for as many as choose to come and take part in the jollification, and as it invariably happens that as many as like unlimited mimbo accept the invitation, the entire population may presently be seen wending one
way—toward the feast house. There they find mats spread not only about the house, but down the street that leads to it, and there they find the cleanly-washed widows decked in spotless calico and wearing anklets and wristlets heavy enough to account for their sedate mien. Then all the guests, having taken care that floods of mimbo are within easy reach, take their seats, and more guns are fired, and the orgie commences, and concludes not till every jar of palm wine has been broached, all the gunpowder expended, every drum-head beaten in, and every kettle hammered into a shapeless thing by the banging of the stones within. The rising moon finds them to a man huddled in every possible attitude about the wine-stained mats, helplessly drunk and with each other’s carcases, and cooking pots, and jars, and fractured drums as pillows. Next day the house of the deceased is razed to the ground, and the mourning for the rich man with many wives is at an end.
While Du Chaillu was sojourning at Sangatanga, the domains of a certain African king named Bango, whose chief revenue is derived from dealing in slaves and by taxing the slave “factors” whose “barracoons” (as the slave warehouses are called) are situated on the coast there; he was witness to the disposal of the body of a poor wretch who had fortunately died before he could be bought, hauled aboard a slaver, and “traded-off” anywhere where the market was briskest. If anything can be told in connexion with the hideous system further to disgust its enemies—which happily includes every man in England’s broad dominions—it is such stories as the following:
“During my stay in the village, as I was one day shooting birds in a grove not far from my house, I saw a procession of slaves coming from one of the barracoons towards the further end of my grove. As they came nearer I saw that two gangs of six slaves each, all chained about the neck, were carrying a burden between them, which I presently knew to be the corpse of another slave. They bore it to the edge of the grove, about three hundred yards from my house, and there throwing it down upon the bare ground returned to their prison, accompanied by their overseer, who with his whip had marched behind them hither. Here, then, is the buryingground of the barracoon, I said to myself sadly, thinking, I confess, of the poor fellow who had been dragged away from his home and friends to die here and be thrown out as food for the vultures, who even as I stood in thought began already to darken the air above my head and were presently heard fighting over the remains.
“The grove, which was in fact but an African aceldama, was beautiful to view from my house, and I had often resolved to explore it and rest in the shade of its dark-foliaged trees. It seemed a ghastly place enough now, as I approached it to see more closely the work of the disgusting vultures. They fled when they saw me, but only a little way, sitting upon the lower branches of the surrounding trees watching me with eyes askance, as though fearful I would rob them of their prey.
“As I walked towards the body I felt something crack under my feet, and looking down saw that I was already in the midst of the field of skulls. I had inadvertently stepped into the skeleton of some poor creature who had been thrown here long enough ago for the birds and ants to pick his bones clean and the rains to bleach them. I think there must have been a thousand such skeletons lying within my sight. The place had been used for many years, and the mortality in the barracoons is sometimes frightful. Here the dead were thrown, and here the vultures found their daily carrion. The grass had just been burned, and the white bones scattered everywhere gave the ground a singular, and when the cause was known, a frightful appearance. Penetrating a little farther into the bush, I found great piles of bones.
The “Master of Life” as represented in Equatorial Africa.
“Here was the place where, when years ago Cape Lopez was one of the great slave markets on the west coast and barracoons were more numerous than now, the poor dead were thrown one upon another till even the mouldering bones remained in high piles as monuments of the nefarious traffic.”
In Angola, in cases of death the body is kept several days, and there is a grand concourse of both sexes, with beating of drums, dances, and debauchery kept up with feasting, etc., according to the means of the relatives. The great ambition of many of the blacks of Angola is to give their friends an expensive funeral. Often when one is asked to sell a pig
he replies, “I am keeping it in case of the death of any of my friends.” A pig is usually slaughtered and eaten on the last day of the ceremonies, and its head thrown into the nearest stream or river. A native will sometimes appear intoxicated on these occasions, and if blamed for his intemperance will reply, “Why, don’t you know that my mother is dead,” as if he thought it a sufficient justification. The expenses of funerals are so heavy that often years elapse before they can defray them.
The Bechuanas of Southern Africa generally bury their dead. The ceremony of interment, etc., varies in different localities and is influenced by the rank of the deceased But the following is a fair specimen of the way in which these obsequies are managed:
On the approaching dissolution of a man, a skin or net is thrown over the body, which is held in a sitting posture with the knees doubled up under the chin, until life is extinct. A grave is then dug—very frequently in the cattle-fold—six feet in depth and about three in width, the interior being rubbed over with a certain large bulb. The body, having the head covered, is then conveyed through a hole made for the purpose in the house and the surrounding fence and deposited in the grave in a sitting position, care being taken to put the face of the corpse against the north. Portions of an ant-hill are placed about the feet, when the net which held the body is gradually withdrawn. As the grave is filled up the earth is handed in with bowls, while two men stand in the hole to tread it down round the body, great care being taken to pick out anything like a root or pebble. When the earth reaches the height of the mouth, a small twig or branch of an acacia is thrown in, and on the top of the head a few roots of grass are placed. The grave being nearly filled, another root of grass is fixed immediately over the head, part of which stands above ground. When this portion of the ceremony is over, the men and women stoop, and with their hands scrape on to the little mound the loose soil lying about. A large bowl of water, with an infusion of bulbs, is now brought, when the men and women wash their hands and the upper part of their legs, shouting “Pùla, pùla” (rain, rain). An old woman, probably a relation, will then bring the weapons of the deceased (bows, arrows, war-axe, and even the bone of an old pack ox), with other things. They finally address the grave, saying, “These are all your articles.” The things are then taken away and bowls of water are poured on the grave, when all retire, the women wailing, “Yo, yo, yo,” with some doleful dirge, sorrowing without hope.
Here is another singular picture of an African burying-ground:
“Near Fetich Point is the Oroungou burying-ground, and this I went to visit the following morning. It lay about a mile from our camp, toward Sangatanga, from which it was distant about half-a-day’s pull in a canoe. It is in a grove of noble trees, many of them of magnificent size and shape. The natives hold this place in great reverence, and refused at first to go with me on my contemplated visit, even desiring that I should not go. I explained to them that I did not go to laugh at their dead, but rather to pay them honour. But it was only by the promise of a large reward that I at last persuaded Niamkala, who was of our party, to accompany me. The negroes visit the place only on funeral errands, and hold it in the greatest awe, conceiving that here the spirits of their ancestors wander about, and that these are not lightly to be disturbed. I am quite sure that treasure to any amount might be left here exposed in perfect safety
“The grove stands by the seashore. It is entirely cleared of underbush, and as the wind sighs through the dense foliage of the trees and whispers in the darkened and somewhat gloomy grove, it is an awful place, even to an unimpressible white man. Niamkala stood in silence by the strand while I entered the domains of the Oroungou dead. They are not put below the surface; they lie about beneath the trees in huge wooden coffins, some of which by their new look betokened recent arrival, but by far the greater number were crumbling away. Here was a coffin falling to pieces, and disclosing a grinning skeleton within. On the other side were skeletons already without covers, which lay in dust beside them. Everywhere were bleached bones and mouldering remains. It was curious to see the brass anklets and bracelets in which some Oroungou maiden has been buried still surrounding her whitened bones, and to note the remains of goods which had been laid in the same coffin with some wealthy fellow now mouldering to dust at his side. In some places there remained only little heaps of shapeless dust, from which some copper or iron or ivory ornament gleamed out to prove that here too once lay a corpse. Passing on to a yet more sombre gloom, I came at last to the grave of old King Pass-all, the brother of his present majesty. The coffin lay on the ground, and was surrounded on every side with great chests, which contained the property of his deceased majesty Among these chests, and on the top of them, were piled huge earthenware jugs, glasses, mugs, plates, iron pots and bars, brass and copper rings, and other precious things, which this old Pass-all had determined to carry at last to the grave with him. And also there lay around numerous skeletons of the poor slaves who were, to the number of one hundred, killed when
the king died, that his ebony kingship might not pass into the other world without due attendance. It was a grim sight, and one which filled me with a sadder awe than even the disgusting barracoon ground.”
In matters of death and burial, as in all other matters pertaining to savagery, Western Africa stands conspicuous. “At the town of Ambago,” says Hutchinson, “when all preliminaries are arranged, they carry the corpse to its last resting-place, accompanied by the surviving relatives, male and female, who bear in a small package a portion of the hair, nails, etc., of the deceased. When arrived at the secluded place which has been prepared to receive the body they deposit it in its last resting-place. Over this they erect a tomb, on which, in a sort of niche, are placed various small earthen or hardware figures, plates, mugs, bottles, etc., together with a variety of edibles; the receptacle prepared to receive these being called quindumbila. After the ceremony, the survivor—husband or wife—is carried from the grave on the back of a person of the same sex, and thrown into the river for ablution or purification. On coming up out of the river, the individual is conveyed back to his residence, where he is obliged to remain secluded for eight days, during which time he must not converse with any person of the opposite sex, nor eat anything that has been boiled, nor wash himself during these days of obit. The friends, meanwhile, enjoy a feast of fowls and other delicacies which has been prepared for the occasion, after which they each make a present to the mourner of something preparatory to the celebration of the great batuque, or dance. If unable to provide for the expense of the funeral, some relative or friend generally becomes security for its payment; this is called “gungo.” After the eight days have elapsed the room is swept, and the mourner is permitted to enjoy comfortable and warm food. On this occasion the eldest child or heir (if any) is brought in and made to sit down on a benza,—a small square seat made of bamboos. They then place upon his head a caginga, or calotte, a kind of hat or cap made of palm straw interwoven, and demand that all the papers belonging to the deceased be produced, that they may learn what his will was in reference to the disposal of his property, and whether he had given liberty to any of his slaves. The nearest of kin is looked upon as the legitimate heir, and accordingly takes possession of all the moveable property.”
Valdez, the African traveller, furnishes some curious examples of the death and funeral ceremonials of the inhabitants of many remote Western African towns. As for instance at Barrodo Beondo:
“Attracted by a strange noise proceeding from the river, I went to ascertain what it was. On arriving at the landing-place I learned that it proceeded from a number of persons who formed an itame, or funeral procession, of a Muxi Loanda who had just died. When any person dies the mourners commence a great lamentation and manifest apparently the most extravagant grief. The corpse is first wrapped in a number of cloths with aromatics and perfumes; it is then conveyed to the place of interment, followed by a large cortege of the relatives and friends of the deceased, the females who accompany the funeral procession being dressed in a long black cloak with a hood which covers the head.
“On the present occasion the Muxi Loanda not being a Christian was buried in a place not far distant from the road, and the grave covered with small stones, a paddle or oar being placed on it in commemoration of the profession of the deceased Many graves are thus marked by the distinctive insignia of office of those interred in them.
“There is another singular custom amongst these people, that of one of the survivors, the nearest of kin to the deceased, being obliged to lie in the bed that was lately occupied by him for the space of three days from the time of removal. During this period the mourning relatives make lamentation at stated intervals each day—namely, at day-break, sunset, and midnight. At the expiration of eight days the relatives and friends reuniting, resume their lamentations and recount the virtues and good deeds of the deceased, occasionally exclaiming ‘Uafu!’ (he is dead), all present at the same time joining in a chorus and exclaiming ‘Ay-ú-é (woe is me). At the expiration of the eighth day they go in solemn procession, headed by the chief mourner, to the sea-side, river, or forest, whichever is nearest, bearing the skull of the pig upon which they had feasted, and on this occasion they suppose that the zumbi or soul of the deceased enters eternal happiness. One month after death the relatives and friends again assemble together and hold a great feast, at which they consume great quantities of cachassa or rum, and which they terminate with that lascivious dance the bateque.”
Among the Bulloms and the Timannees, we are informed by Winterbottom, the chief solemnity and magnificence of their funerals consists in the quantity of rum and tobacco expended upon the occasion, which they call “making a cry.” Among the poorer sort this ceremony is sometimes deferred for several months after the body is buried, until they can procure a sufficient quantity of these indispensable articles to honour the memory of the deceased. The funeral or “cry” of Mr. James Cleveland
